Prolepsis

Shadows cast by coming events. More to the point, intuitive awareness or those shadows before they are even noticed.

This is an early heads-up about a book that will change the world. New book? Of course. Actually it was first published in 1980, its eleventh version in 2002. It was written by a man who walked, and still walks the same earth as all the rest of us do. Just like Charles Darwin who saw nothing that anyone else had never seen before, but like Darwin, the writer of this book didn’t understand what everyone else understood. Darwin asked questions that no one else had ever asked before. And since these questions had never been asked before, there were no answers. He had to figure them out for himself.

So too this book which is called “The Nature of Order”, walks over familiar ground, sees all those things that we all know, but it asks the questions that we never thought of asking. We all have wondered about them - but we never asked them. And we never tried to answer them.

Christopher Alexander has actively lived in our commonly shared world of wonder for a long time. He was the driving force behind the great book which he co-authored called “The Pattern Language”, which has always seemed sufficient unto itself - until now. But that book was basically a statement of axioms which he had discovered and organized. This new book is a discussion of how those “axioms” came to be, how they work, how they are organized and how their fundamental composition can be used by us to shape a new world in which we might someday live and work.

I have read 88 pages of the first volume which is titled “The Phenomenon of Life”. Not always easy reading. Alexander is an architect, not a writer. He repeats a lot, but he has a lot to say. This first volume is some 475 pages, and is followed by volume two, “The Process of Creating LIfe”; volume three, “A Vision of a Living World”; and volume four, “The Luminous Ground”. And the books are expensive. What was he thinking?

Well, the book is not for everyone. I put the “Nature of Order” on my Blogspot page and found a grand total of nine people in the world who have also done that. I have corresponded with one or two. Strange people they are. Not like me. But interesting.

Prolepsis. Just so you will know.

Requiem for a Rassler?

A sad movie, from my point of view, which showed America slipping under an imaginary boundary separating "second-world" from "third-world" nation. It seemed to me a brutal story terribly told of trapped and tortured animals of the homo sapiens species, although not quite human in some awful sense. Strippers, on the one hand who only resembled human females in physical form but who were denied expression of the defining traits of femininity. On the other end of this tale are the "wrestlers", far removed from their Grecian prototypes and far also removed from the gestalt of human correspondence, retaining only that vestige visited occasionally by the normal male of "good-ole boy" bondage. Their common bond being their willingness to permit their "friends" to savagely and excessively rip their bodies apart for the amusement of their "fans". Once out of the glitter of the performing stage, these pitiful creatures were blown by the winds of winter along frozen landscapes decorated with destroyed buildings and decrepit trailer parks through a world which held them in smug contempt. All this for those few moments when they performed for their clearly emotionally-deformed admirers. Perhaps the worst part of it all was the premise that these gifts of life are being passed not from a Great Creator to an Adam-creature as seen in Michelango's great work and who can now commence on his own volition, but from a detritus of human wreckage left by a society which had collapsed and are "awarded" as a finger might point to the blame.

The real story of this movie, for me at least, is a call to examine our own lives to see how much we too strive to honor principles and serve masters who seek our souls and our humanity.

Academia Nut?

Went to Lenoir-Rhyne University today to see a photo exhibition. It was in the Visual Arts Center (VAC) which is listed as being on 8th Avenue NE, but really isn’t there at all. There are no signs on 8th Avenue to show its presence, and none of the five people (students?) I asked on 8th Avenue knew where it was. It was supposed to be at 643 and 1/2 on the avenue and there was 653 and the building next to it was 633 and nothing in between except a maintenance shop which was well back off the street. Turns out the VAC is behind the maintenance shop. Once there I found five parking spaces. They were all taken, of course.

Well, once in the VAC, which seems to be basically a converted construction shed, there were about 60 or 65 photographs displayed on walls. The pictures were black-matted on white paper and covered with cellophane-type material. Many of them appeared to be about 6X8 or 8X10 inches. A few were a little larger.

Two of the pictures were nice and two others were interesting. There was a lot of trouble with darkness in the pictures and only one or two were completely in focus. That’s not a big problem for me, but I do try to keep the out-of-focus parts in the background and not the subject as was often the case here. Colors seemed kind of jarring with lots of improvisation and not much harmony, saturation was completely missing. Tones were not usually organized and a lot of the photos were hung up in the two, three, four zonal range. There was no composition or even use of design elements, no stories were told. The only emotions emerging from the display were faint whiffs of puzzlement. Snacks were offered and “Barefoot” wine was available. The wine accompanied the photographs very well and the munchies were eleganté.

Well, I haven’t mentioned the photographer’s name and I won’t. The whole thing seemed so bizarre, especially with all these obviously well-educated people standing there, peering intently at the photographs, thoughtfully munching their goodies and knowingly sipping their wine, I felt like I had gone terribly wrong and missed the entire message. So I walked outside and came back in again. That didn’t help.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves in a vacuous kind of way. I felt left out. Some of them actually seemed to be floating there in front of the photos. I guess it is just an academia thing.

There IS such a thing as photographic art. And one of the things any artist learns early in that game is to show ONLY your very best work.